Wage dumping and Covid: Migrant workers in the meat-packing industry | DW Documentary

Thousands of Romanians are moving to Germany or France to work on farms or in the meat-packing industry. The work is hard -- and dangerous, because of the Covid pandemic. This mass emigration has created labor shortages back home.

Many of them believe that the only way to earn a decent wage is to move to a foreign country. And who's filling low-wage jobs in Romania? Immigrants from Asia. It's a spiral of despair.

The Romanian village of Goreni is located in the Transylvania region. There are hardly any jobs there, so many of the residents have moved to western Europe to find work. For example, Elisabeta picks strawberries in Germany. Her husband Zlotan works as a welder in France. Their son Paul worked for a while for Tönnies, a German meat-packing company, and then returned to Romania. Now, he wants to go back, even though his aunt and uncle were infected with Covid at the same plant. They're now in quarantine in Germany. Elisabeta is concerned about this situation. What's more, she was recently cheated out of much of the money that she'd earned at the strawberry farm. But this family will do whatever it takes to earn a living.

Since Romania joined the EU in 2007, prices there have risen sharply. Food is often more expensive than it is in Germany. One-quarter of all Romanians work on small farms, and they're having a tough time making ends meet. An estimated four-million Romanians, about 20-percent of the entire population, have now moved to foreign countries to work -- including a number of young adults.

So there's a shortage of Romanian workers to fill low-wage jobs. Vasile owns a chain of hamburger restaurants in Cluj, in northern Romania. He has jobs to fill, but local residents won't take them because the pay is too low. So Vasile has recruited 13 men from Sri Lanka.
Many from Asia also work at the meat-packing plant in Cluj. It's a tough, messy job, and it doesn't pay very well. Last year, despite the Covid crisis, Romania issued more than 30,000 visas to workers from Asian countries.

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